I was having trouble sleeping.
\nTo try, I drank. When I slept, I sweated, woke
\nin early darkness, stumbled up to piss.
\nBack in bed, I remembered things\u2014
\nthe breath of the adults\u2014
\na Christmas party I went to as a boy\u2014
\nthe children\u2019s hands
\ntaken into bigger hands, our endurance
\nas our faces were touched, our hair touched, re-arranged.<\/p>\n
I walked all day to exhaust myself.
\nBuses were long insects
\nturning onto Broadway.
\nIn this way the winter passed.<\/p>\n
*
\nBut it didn\u2019t pass.
\nI was living in the north,
\nand the sky was a stone,
\nblank and frozen.<\/p>\n
At night it lightened, pink,
\nfed by the glow from the town.
\nBy morning it returned,
\nwhiter, lower.<\/p>\n
Every 26 days I flew south for a weekend with my sister.
\nEach time I appeared she seemed in some distress\u2014
\nher brown hair, once thick, was thinning\u2014
\nthe drain was clogged\u2014
\nand I tended to her before returning.<\/p>\n
Back in my rooms, I opened the cabinet.
\nI closed it.
\nI thought:<\/p>\n
if I could wait till 8 pm\u2014
\nif I had a half glass of water in between\u2014<\/p>\n
the second and third drink\u2014<\/p>\n
the fifth and the sixth.
\nI lay awake. I thought of distant ships
\nflinching toward each other
\non the green screen of a ship\u2019s radar,
\na mass at the bottom
\nto represent land.<\/p>\n
*
\nThere was a dragon in the book
\nmy father read to me when I was young.
\nIt flew over cities. Its nails
\nwere claws. Its head was
\nnoble, broad and scaled.<\/p>\n
It slept with its face
\ntucked beneath its wing, in the rear of its cave,
\nchained.<\/p>\n
It was protecting something,
\nor had been forced to.<\/p>\n
Through the wall, my neighbor moaned
\nin a way I envied\u2014to be so filled.<\/p>\n
I got up and poured\u2014
\nthe torches of planes
\npassed through the sky.<\/p>\n
Time passed as slow as a hair
\ntrying to grow through skin.<\/p>\n
Snow fell.<\/p>\n
Time passed
\nfast as that same hair
\ncut by a razor.<\/p>\n
*
\nIn February I went south, fixed blinds
\nto her windows, cleaned her rugs.<\/p>\n
She seemed better,
\nand worse. She slept, but her hair had grown sparser,
\nthe dark strands
\nstark against her pale scalp.<\/p>\n
What ailed her was inexplicable\u2014
\nI thought of how our dog used to gnaw its tail
\ntill it bled.<\/p>\n
I stood by the window
\nuntil the windows opposite became slim
\nlit bars.<\/p>\n
She toppled a plate
\nas I packed to leave.
\nWe circled the date of my next visit.<\/p>\n
*
\nIt became important to me
\nwhether the dragon was good.
\nWho were the women who came to visit him
\nin their dresses, with their scepters?
\nWhat was it guarding?<\/p>\n
I couldn\u2019t remember\u2014<\/p>\n
was the dragon kind? Would it hurt
\njust to hurt?<\/p>\n
Its tail could sweep men
\ninto a moat at a flick.<\/p>\n
When it breathed,
\nsomething burned\u2014<\/p>\n
its whole body seemed a weapon.<\/p>\n
*
\nThere was a place between the sixth and eighth drink
\nwhere everything diminished,
\nthe body inside but at a distance
\nfrom the wall of the shell but
\nstill encased in the thin lucid membrane\u2014<\/p>\n
needles, tubes, the soul\u2019s liquid
\nfilling up a glass\u2014<\/p>\n
she\u2019d called to say they\u2019d drained a cyst\u2014<\/p>\n
and I stood in my living room
\nas I\u2019d once stood as a child
\non the shore, in the tide,
\nthe draining sand sinking
\nmy feet deeper, my arms out for balance\u2014<\/p>\n
*
\nAt the terminal I arrived at in her city
\nthe moving walkway was always broken.
\nA display of miniature weather balloons
\nin festive colors adorned the air
\nnear the ceiling, in all seasons,<\/p>\n
and because they were there in all seasons
\nand because the defining features of my visits
\nwere the ebb and flow of her condition,
\nand the nights spent by the window watching
\nlight return to other windows
\nas the day came,<\/p>\n
the visits, over time, grew indistinct from one another,
\nlike the trick of the one bright silk
\nin the clown\u2019s fist
\nbecoming many
\nand then becoming one again.<\/p>\n
The balloons appeared to float.<\/p>\n
I went back and forth from my sister\u2019s door.<\/p>\n
We grew close.<\/p>\n
She took an interest in my duffel
\nand when it became worn,
\nshe bought another, and another in anticipation
\nof the previous one\u2019s deteriorating condition.<\/p>\n
Beside them, in the closet, she made a space
\nfor my sweaters.
\nFrost spread across the windows.<\/p>\n
And when I was having trouble sleeping,
\nto try, I drank.<\/p>\n
And when I slept, I sweated, woke
\nin darkness, stumbled up to piss.<\/p>\n
And when I was back in bed
\nI would remember things\u2014
\na Christmas party I attended as a boy\u2014
\nthe breath of the adults\u2014
\nthe sky lowering each morning\u2014
\nthe dragon sleeping over its bars of gold.<\/p>\n
I was having trouble sleeping. To try, I drank. When I slept, I sweated, woke in early darkness, stumbled up to piss. Back in bed, I remembered things\u2014 the breath of the adults\u2014 a Christmas party I went to as a boy\u2014 the children\u2019s hands taken into bigger hands, our endurance as our faces were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":647,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[56],"tags":[25],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s6Jypy-dragons","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14346"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/647"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14346"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14346\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14347,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14346\/revisions\/14347"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}